StarTalk All-Stars Live! at Awesome Con (Part 1): To Mars and Beyond

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About This Episode

Grab your suitcase and science kit because this week StarTalk All-Stars Live! is taking you on a journey to another world. Recorded last year at Awesome Con in Washington D.C., Bill Nye and co-host Eugene Mirman invite former Deputy Administrator of NASA Dr. Dava Newman, astrobiologist Dr. David Grinspoon, and comedians Jo Firestone and Hari Kondabolu to break down the journey to Mars. With Dava in the house, you’ll get details on NASA’s plan to put humans on the red planet. Find out about the ExoMars orbiter, NASA’s timeline for Martian expeditions, the biggest challenge humans face voyaging to Mars, and the future search for Martian fossils. Discover Mars’ wet and wild past and listen to Eugene compare it to modern day Costa Rica. Learn about the methane found on Mars: its unusual behavior and the role it might play in a ship’s return trip to Earth. Take a trip back to “the disco era” to explore the Viking 1 mission and why the world, as Bill puts it, “totally freaked” when it was doing experiments on the Martian surface. Hear about astronaut Scott Kelly’s year in space, his Earth-Art project, and what his experiments have shown about long distance space travel. You’ll also hear the best way you can support NASA – whether by calling your representatives or, as our comedians suggest, a massive bake sale of moon pies. All this, plus, our panel ponders superheroes, superpowers, and the most vexing question of all… “How do we look for life if we don’t know anything about life elsewhere?”